Utilities such as Google Earth and Bing Maps are powerful tools used by most everyone in the workforce today. Many businesses use those tools to plan sales routes or to size up market areas by what limited data they have before them. However, today’s technology can reach beyond that. It’s called “Geospatial Business Intelligence.”

Currently, we are able to illustrate several examples of this advanced mapping technology, some of it as easy to use as Google Earth. Everything from helping you find client prospects to providing you detailed demographic reports about your region or territory are just the starting grounds for what we’re capable of today. The big question is: “What are
some of the things you’ve always wanted to know about Business Geography that you can’t normally find on a map?”

Here are some answers to the puzzle that might get your mind going:

• Alternate sales routes illustrating potential gas/time/mileage savings.

• Areas of cities where population growth is higher. (think in terms of land use planning or attracting industry to town)

• Housing and land costs compared by distance, location, and even climate.

• Potential customers in a given area based on how much they spend on similar products.

• Areas where you might lose [wireless/cell phone/radio/TV] reception as you’re driving along the highway.

• Industry surplus/leakages by categorical breakdown. (whom your competitors are and whether or not there are too many of them)

• Demographic breakdowns of consumers (complete with tapestry segmentation) within 5, 10, and 15-minute drive times around your location.

• Optimal sites for a certain [widget] store.

• All the businesses that sell [widgets] and are sized with [x] number of employees at [y] dollar volumes, along with their names, addresses, phone numbers, along with even the driving directions to get there.

Tri-State Engineering has recently adapted the GIS technology for commercial uses, and we currently serve our clients up with thorough demographic reports including everything from population densities and incomes all the way to consumer expenditures and how much we spend annually on televisions, bicycles, hand soaps, auto loans... and so much more. If you want to pick the best site for your next business, we can pinpoint the best centralized location that will get you a larger share of the area's market potential. It's well-worth the investment for start-up businesses or those who want to grow and expand!

Geographic Information Systems, to me, should be re-translated to Spatial Knowledge Management. It's nothing more than linking databases of information to points, lines, and shapes that are spatially connected in some way. In our case, it happens to be primarily purposed for map-making. We use it to compare aerial imagery to parcel outlines to road networks to water/sewer lines to topography to zoning to land use and even down to watershed delineation for flood hazard modelling.

However, other industries may find GIS a bountiful tool for slightly different applications. A scientist once mapped the human body in a GIS system. Every three-dimensional artery and nerve ending might have a unique ID tagged with it's own integrated set of measurable data, like blood pressure or electrical activity. It's clickable, query-able, label-able, and identifiable. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, may use a similar GIS application to model a complete store layout with ALL inventory zoned, labelled, and tracked within a complete desktop interface. Better yet, they can study and simulate what traffic patterns customers make throughout their store to better assess the placement of their inventory for maximum visibility and purchasing influence. It's nothing more than clickable shapes that link to data sets with unlimited information relevant to their location.



Tri-State Engineering holds the power to create powerful, thorough maps for our clients using this GIS tool.

A Water Department can locate the positions of all their water meters, valves, hydrants, mains, etc. This allows them to visually see it all on a map, of course. But so much more than that, they can use the entire network to model water pressure affected by tower placement before it ever goes to construction. They can click a hydrant and up pops a photo of what it looks like at that very location. They can click a meter and view all the readings appended to its history, view its account standing, or see any service issues associated with that account. Better yet, let's say it snows 12 inches overnight and someone calls in a busted main. Where are you going to find the valve to shut it off? Using GIS, the valve is recorded with sub-meter accuracy that can lead you directly to it in the field with a handheld GPS-enabled data collector. Any conditional information you have on-site can then be uploaded back to the headquarters for future handling.

The Police can use GIS to delegate routes, obtain addresses, append crime logs to parcels or city blocks and collect other erroneous data when necessary for police beats. They can analyze crime based on neighborhood density with racial or ethnic influences but overlaying Census data on the map. And, aside from that, they can use the GIS map to interactively track other police cars in the area, stage roadblocks, manage terrorist threats, and even take control of streetlights for emergency traffic routing all from just mouse clicks on a computer screen.

A Contractor can look at an aerial photograph to see natural property boundaries and layout a proposed site using the visual surroundings. He can then check to see what environmental hazards, such as area mines or flood plains, might get in the way of the property. Turning on a utilities layer shows what area water/sewer/electric/gas networks are nearby. Finally, turning on an elevation dataset, such as contours or a USGS topo map, allows him to see what parts of the land are actually suitable for building on versus which need to be improved. These simple steps can save weeks of research and phone calls, which are priceless to a job under the gun.

A Business Manager can swoop down to any metropolitan area with GIS data and determine what types of customers populate their surroundings, how dense the retail industries are, and even what air pollution might deter potential customers from frequenting certain areas of town. To a fast-food franchise wanting to establish roots in a new city, it is often preferable to establish business near competing chains in high areas of traffic and visibility. Not only traffic reports can be dropped onto the map and analyzed, but also all businesses with common clientelle and services can be located on the map, too. Those businesses, mixed with the traffic reports, can be the data input for a 10-mile radiused buffer, revealing "hot zones" on the map for which the new businesses should look at targeting. Then, a parcel map can be overlayed showing tax assessment and vacancy status of area parcels for further suitability study.

Environmental Agents use GIS more and more every day. From water sampling in the rivers and streams to tracking animals in the wild, GIS is becoming a mainstream way of conducting their studies in our modern times. It is highly possible, using GIS and third-party technologies integrated together, to sample a forest and map out the densities of a rare bird species in the area, all its prey, and all its predators all at once. Then, using this data, it is possible to assess what needs to be done to preserve the species... possibly study other sites that might serve as better areas for the species to relocate to. Regular data collection and even GPS/Satellite monitoring can allow for live data to continuosly propogate GIS maps, making scientific studies much more feasible in dangerous and threatening environments.

What we use GIS for on a regular basis is primarily the acquisition of hi-res aerial photography for preliminary site studies. We often overlay 3D contours, parcel data, utility layers, and street networks to navigate, assess, and extract valuable information pertaining to new projects so it can be used as a reference for CAD techs and engineers in their design processes. Sometimes it goes a step further with delineating flood basins or calculating optimised visibility between two points between hills and valleys. And, sometimes it has everything to do with finding the lowest or the highest points of the land for finding the best-suited site for a new water tower, for instance.

Another use for GIS in our industry is "asset inventory." To take photos of every street sign, every manhole, every utility box, and every flashing signal; to put them into a map with ID tags, current condition, life expectancy, etc.; and to assess the value of all of those things to establish their cumulative worth is quite valuable to City Management in today's time. It takes quite a bit of time and capital resources, but once the system is in place, the cost to maintain it is greatly outweighed by the benefit of having that data at your fingertips whenever you need it on-demand.



In all the ways above, we can quite conceivably handle any mapping needs for our clients' demands. If you can put it together in your head, chances are it can be digitized into the world.

My perception of GIS mapping is an ever evolving, rapidly changing industry that can tremendously benefit the needs of our modern society in so many ways. Within these blogs, I will project my views and experiences using this technology to solve real-world problems and discuss any milestones or setbacks along the way.

So what's the big deal with GIS, anyway?

Imagine programming an intricate Access Database housing every possible address on Earth, every possible street sign, every last park and stream, all the types of commerce in every given city, and possibly even rush hour traffic counts for determining the safest routes to commute via bicycle from home to work and back each day. (You're shuddering, aren't you?)

But why stop there?

Now take all that data and throw in population densities of urban networks. Splash in some hydrology information about watershed basins across the land and link them to topographical elevations. Underlay water and sewer distribution networks and calculate the linear feet in a given area to be dug up and reworked. Send bulk mail to every address surrounding a proposed landfill. Control lighting at intersections to reflow and streamline traffic in a downtown emergency. Evaluate and report on the density of the deer population surrounding a major proposed highway. Find out how much pollution contaminates a nearby community's local water supply. And better yet, do all of these things and so, so much more with interactive, dynamic relevance to the environment and related surroundings with both historical and real live data.

Think you can accomplish all this by programming your own database?

With GIS, everything comes together in a common ground. It's a map. It's a dynamic, living, growing map full of layers, statistics, analyses, spatial relationships, color, charts, aerial orthographs, shapes, labels, and best of all... dimension. It can be a map of an entire city, the layout of a store's inventory, the human body's circulatory system, or the entire Earth in and of itself.

The better question to ask is "What can we make it do for YOU?"

Stay tuned for more insight into this answer!